Renée Poznanski’s book Jews in France during World War II (University Press of New England, 2001) was awarded the Jacob Buchman Prize for the Memory of the Holocaust. The book presents an extraordinary panorama of Jewish daily life in all of France during World War II. The Jews in France during World War II provides a detailed and nuanced account of Jews in both occupied and Vichy France as well as of Jewish life in French camps. In addition to standard French and German documentation, Poznanski relies on non-published sources (diaries, reports by various organizations, personal corresponence) to build riveting collective portraits of Jewish suffering and survival. Even more than this, she uses these sources to illuminate “the rhythm of French and German persecution, the reactions of Jewish and non-Jewish opinion, and the various strategies of the Jewish victims.” A crucial contribution to French Jewish and Holocaust historiography, and an important corrective to much of the literature that treats Jews as victims rather than as subjects able to make (some) choices, The Jews in France during World War II is an authoritative work in the field.

Renée Poznanski is the Yaakov and Poria Avnon Professor of Holocaust Studies in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, a department she created and has led for several years. She has published extensively on Jews in France during World War II: her research examines their daily lives, relations between Jews and non-Jews, and the impact of memory on the historiography of this period.

Her latest book, Propagandes et persécutions: La Résistance et le “problème juif,” 1940–1944 [Propaganda and persecution: the Resistance and the “Jewish problem,” 1940–1944] (Fayard, 2008), received the 2009 Prix Hertz from the Chancellerie des universités de Paris. Poznanski earned a PhD in political science from Sciences Po in Paris.